“I believe that science and religion are intellectual cousins under the skin. Both are searching for motivated relief… both must be open to the possibility of correction. Neither deals simply with pure fact or with mere opinion. They are both part of the human endeavor to understand.”
John Polkinghorne – Quarks, Chaos and Christianity
When you strip away all the dogma, doctrines, religion, theology, commandments and everything else we have attached to our perspectives of God, regardless of your own belief (or anti-belief) system, I believe it all comes down to one basic question: where did we come from? Or maybe, what is the source of creation? It’s a very human question and a very human quest to find the answer. And with a tip of the hat to the great philosopher The Dude, this quest abides.
So, does modern science dispense with all this “god nonsense” or does it somehow reinforce that something beyond ourselves has a hand in the ongoing process of Creation? There are really smart people on either side of this debate and it is healthy for us to have it. What is the role of the theologian in the midst of new scientific discoveries about the universe and the very nature of matter itself? Is it to defend tradition against threats of heresy or is it to reinterpret what we have come to believe in light of new revelations about the Creator and the Creation? The role of the scientist is to explain how and the role of the theologian is to explain why. And there are highly enlightened people who make the case that these two perspectives are clearly not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are highly dependent on each other.
The fascinating thing is that in the last 100 – 150 years or so, more progress has been made in this quest than all the millennia before now. A century is a long time in the lifespan of humans but in the context of human history, it is a blink. This blue sphere, this 3rd rock from the Sun upon which we ride, has been around roughly 4.5 Billion years. Humans showed up between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago and we organized ourselves into communities and complex societies around 10,000 years ago. That’s 100 centuries. So let’s consider the 100 centuries to be a 12 hour clock. The last 100 years represents 7 minutes and 12 seconds on this clock of organized humanity. Really want to blow your mind? Put the 4.5 Billion years on a 12 hour clock and humans have been around for about 2 seconds. A substantial foundation of this conversation is built upon our concept of time and how it impacts our perspective about ourselves and our relationship with a Creator. There will be plenty of time to dig into SpaceTime Theology, Evolution and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, not to mention Quantum Physics. For now, let’s look at the Science/Theology debate with respect to the existence of a Creator.
What I want to do here is to lay the foundation for building a relationship between Science and Theology. I use the word Theology deliberately because it is the study of the nature of God and God’s relationship with the Creation. The word is relatively free of association with any particular religion or sect as most organized religions have some form of academic theology to help interpret the relationship between Creator and Creation. Admittedly, there are two caveats here. The first is that my perspective is heavily influenced by my Judaeo/Christian tradition and my familiarity with other traditions is shallow at best. Second, by definition, Theology assumes a belief in a creator or at least the existence of the divine in some form.
Theology is a science in itself in that it is never static. Scientific study involves forming questions and theories about what is (hypotheses), testing those hypotheses and interpreting results based on the information or data. When new data are available, the previous results must be challenged and retested, sometimes turning what we believe on its head, which brings controversy and crisis of belief. In this respect, theology is no different than any other scientific pursuit. Theories are developed and later disproved with new information and debate. This should not detract from universal truths about the essence of the Creator. Rather, we gain new insights about our relationship the Creator as we gain new perspectives about the Creation.
Galileo discovered heliocentrism (the earth revolving around the Sun). He enjoyed support among the Jesuits until an inquisition determined his discovery was heretical and threatening to the control of the church. It meant that the Earth was no longer the center of the universe, which challenged mankind’s place in the created order. For his discovery of new information, he was sentenced to house arrest for the balance of his life.
Isaac Newton rocked our world with his development of universal gravitation and the laws of motion. His work in optics introduced the idea that light was composed of particles rather than an energy wave, which was contested until just a few decades ago when the scientific community declared a draw and said that light behaves both like particles and waves. When you ask a wave question, you get a wave answer. When you ask a particle question, you get a particle answer. The cool thing about Newton is that he was a scientist with a profound understanding of theology and a believer in the Christian tradition. Here was a man who recognized the bond between science and theology and was perfectly comfortable living in between the two, although he had certain alternative views on some points of Christian doctrine, which were considered to be heretical at the time and even now. Nonetheless, he warned us against taking the truths about scientific discovery at the exclusion of belief in a Creator:
“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”
Isaac Newton – Tiner, J.H. (1975). Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher. Milford, Michigan: Mott Media. ISBN978-0-915134-95-3.
For over 300 years, Newton’s work has defined how we understand modern physics, even until now, and at the time, fit well into our understanding of the Creator. By then, somehow the theologians had become comfortable with heliocentrism as non-threatening to the existence of God. And even though Newton’s work still guides our thinking in the way we perceive the world around us, Einstein came along and sort of blew it all out of the water with the Theory of Relativity, which completely redefined our understanding of gravity, how the universe works, and he brought us into the era of SpaceTime.
Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Born and a host of others discovered that all matter was composed of atoms with some combination of protons, neutrons and electrons but it doesn’t stop there. Not only are atoms made of smaller particles like quarks and gluons, but at the atomic level, Newtonian Physics seems to be suspended as well. Our understanding of the laws of space and time do not apply here. We can know what electrons are doing but we can’t know where they are, unless we know where they are but then we can’t know what they are doing. And if you really want to knock yourself out, imagine the fact that the behavior of an electron on our planet is influenced by an electron somewhere else in the universe – in real time! Thanks to Schrodinger’s Cat, we can tickle our noodle about that one. Everything we thought about the universe has changed in the last 100 years, a few nanoseconds in the existence of mankind.
And of course, there’s Charles Darwin. Darwin’s family tradition was Unitarianism, although he was baptized Anglican and attended Anglican boarding schools. He even studied to become Anglican clergy. In his early years as a scientist, he was a proponent of the idea that God was active in the Creation through laws of nature. Darwin’s extensive research over many years led him to conclude that species adapt and evolve over time (a lot of time… remember the planet history clock?). Darwin did not expressly take on the origin of humans in his landmark work On The Origin of Species, but he dropped enough hints that the human relationship to other primates, specifically apes, could be inferred. The work was certainly controversial in its day, especially in theological circles where the reaction ranged from proof of divine design to outright heresy. Once again, Science and Theology were split apart and that split persisted for more than 150 years to the present time. Darwin’s conclusions took their own toll on him personally. He struggled to reconcile what he knew to be true about Creation with the problems of evil and suffering. If a master omniscient Creator were at work in the world, why do these problems exist? These are great questions with which to struggle and I believe Darwin’s work changed the way humans perceive their relationship with their Creator. Theologians and scientists seemed to draw a line in the sand. Darwin was challenging the authenticity of the Bible as the divine record of creation and upset the idea that mankind was the pinnacle of that creation by associating us with lesser mammals as merely the next step of some ongoing process. And, a generation of rationalists who were looking for proof that God does not exist now had their scientific basis. The debate went on for decades and reached around the world. Legal battles like the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920’s were fought over the inclusion of evolution being taught in public schools. The debate persists among laypeople who favor a traditional and literal Biblical interpretation of the Creation narrative.
It is only in the last 75 years or so that the Theologians and the Scientists have begun to work together again to come to terms what what we know to be true about our planet and more specifically, how humans fit into the Creation narrative. One example is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Jesuit scientist with a profound interest in geology and paleontology. He was among the scientists that discovered the Peking Man, a very close relative of modern humans. Teilhard wanted to blend Christian thought with modern science and traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to consider how evolution could be explained and perhaps embraced from a Christian perspective. He outlined his argument in The Phenomenon of Man (1955). Teilhard’s theory was that man continues to evolve toward a mental, social, and spiritual unity he called the Omega Point. He even took on the problems of evil and suffering as necessary components of this evolution to unity with the Creator. It is interesting to note that the Catholic Church prohibited the publication of his research during his lifetime, with which Teilhard dutifully complied.
There are a number of contemporary thinkers who are bridging the span between science and theology, and informing our perspective about Creation. We will touch on many of them later, but for now, I would like to introduce one person at the forefront of this movement. John Polkinghorne is a Theoretical Physicist who was Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Polkinghorne is in good company as other Royal Society Fellows include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, Elizabeth Blackburn, and many many others. He also studied for and became an Anglican priest. Through several books, Polkinghorne is interpreting theological issues and problems in light of his profound understanding of what we now know about the Universe. In his book Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, he scratches the surface on the issues of pain and suffering, the development of consciousness, the freedom of Creation to be itself as a continuous process, and the inter-connectedness of matter across the Universe. Wow!!!! Here is a human being who is grappling with the great theological and philosophical questions of our time by looking for connections to what we have learned in astrophysics and quantum mechanics.
I believe the pendulum is swinging back toward a time of collaboration between what we are learning about our universe (Science) and how it reconciles with how our relationship with our Creator develops (Theology). Perhaps the theologians are are only now catching up. Or, perhaps this is precisely how the Creator chooses to be revealed; in due time and according to our ability to understand. We are the pinnacle of Creation in the sense that we are the only Creatures given the gift of reflection on our existence and our future. And we have been created to ask the questions how and why. Science explains how and the job of the Theologian is to struggle with the answer why. These are not mutually exclusive. We have to be open to having our core beliefs challenged from time to time. This means with new information, new data and new discoveries, we need to ask how this fits into our narrative of Creation and what that means to the development of our relationship with the Creator. The metaphors and poetry of our sacred scriptures reflect what our prophets knew and understood at the time the scriptures were written. Moses could not have known about Newtonian Physics, General Relativity, plate tectonics or anything about biological evolution. What he knew was what was knowable in his time and what the Creator chose to reveal in that moment. It was clearly enough to inspire a narrative about a Creator who desires to have a relationship with the Creation and how that relationship continues to unfold. Nothing I have read about General Relativity, Quantum Physics, or evolutionary biology refutes this truth.
I think of it this way. The Universe is 14 billion years old. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and humans have been walking on two feet for about 200,000. If the Creator went to the trouble to create a whole universe with billions of galaxies in order to find the proper conditions and just the right circumstances for sustaining the only life forms we know of that are conscious, sentient, and desiring to know their creator, how wondrous is that?????? Six days or 11 billion years – in the realm of eternity, it is but a moment in the present. And in the metaphor of the “clock of the Universe,” humans only just arrived at the party. All this for us? I can’t wait for the band to start playing! (I really hope it’s not disco!)
Be well, do good, walk humbly
Copyright 2019 Shawn A. Carson
wildsabbath.com 